The Holocaust: A New History

by Laurence Rees

  Emil Klein, an ‘old fighter’ in the Nazi party, who had taken part in the Beer-Hall Putsch back in 1923, could scarcely believe what was happening now, fifteen years later: ‘When I heard that the annexation march was under way – I was Senior Regional Commander of the Hitler Youth – I was so enthused, because I had some Austrian connections from my early years, and without permission from my superiors and without asking, I took my car and drove to Austria, following the troops through Passau. What I experienced there I will not experience a second time in my life. This enthusiasm! Neither I, nor the soldiers, I imagine, have ever received as many kisses as we did from the girls who rushed to us. Austria was stood on its head.’49

  Hitler crossed the border into Austria on the afternoon of 12 March, just a few hours after his soldiers had made the same journey. His crossing point was symbolic – across the River Inn at his birthplace of Braunau am Inn. He drove in triumph, past cheering crowds, all the way to the city of Linz where he had gone to school. Reinhard Spitzy, an Austrian Nazi who had joined the German Foreign Office, was in the sixth car in the procession, driving behind Hitler. For Spitzy, this was a profoundly emotional moment: ‘All my dreams of reuniting Austria with Germany – don’t forget Austria was ruling Germany during 600 years and the German crown is in Vienna in the Hofburg. And so for me, after the defeat of the year 1918, for us it was a dream … I must tell you the enthusiasm was, I won’t say a hundred per cent but let us say eighty-five per cent, it was overwhelming … I saw even police and nuns with swastika flags. We all thought it is a new peaceful big Reich, because for the Austrians – I’m Austrian myself – war is something we don’t like. We lost so many wars against Prussia, against England and France, and so on, we are fed up with the wars … Anschluss was one of the successes of Hitler without war, like the occupation of the Rhineland, and what he did is perfectly in order.’50

  At the time, claims Spitzy, he thought he knew exactly what Hitler’s ambitions were: ‘Hitler, from the very beginning, wanted to unite all German-speaking countries, except Switzerland or Luxembourg, in the old Holy Roman Empire of German nations. He wanted to restore the injustice of the Thirty Years War, of the peace of Münster and Osnabrück, he wanted to make Germany as big as it was in the Middle Ages.’

  This idea that Hitler’s ultimate aim was to reunite German-speakers, rather than pursue a war of conquest in the east, was a common misconception – and one Hitler encouraged in his public pronouncements. Spitzy, who served in the German embassy in London in the 1930s, discovered first hand that plenty of members of the British ruling elite saw little problem in a Europe where all German-speakers lived together: ‘as long as he [Hitler] did that, he got an understanding from a great part of the British Establishment. They all had understanding. They told me.’

  In Austria, while the state had not imposed similar anti-Semitic measures to those in Germany, there was still considerable ‘traditional’ prejudice of the kind that Kurt Lueger, the former mayor of Vienna, would have recognized. Walter Frentz, for instance, travelled to Vienna in 1928 and claimed that he experienced the attitude of some Viennese to Jews when he was travelling on a tram. ‘Suddenly the tram made an emergency stop in the street,’ says Frentz, who would later become Hitler’s cameraman. ‘And there was a man on the track who hadn’t seen the tram coming. And, after breaking, the tram driver said something that shocked me and left a deep impression. “Oh dear, it’s a Jew. If I had known, I would have continued driving!” And all the other Viennese said: “Yes, that’s what you should have done, the Jewish pig!” And they didn’t even know the man.’51 Susi Seitz, who cheered as Hitler entered Linz in March 1938, was another Austrian who had issues with the Jews, though she expresses her feelings rather more diplomatically: ‘I must say that the Jews were not very much liked in Austria … We never had the feeling that they were the same as us, they were different, completely different.’52

  From the moment the Germans entered Austria the Jews were at risk. ‘We heard the noises from the streets,’ says Walter Kammerling, a fifteen-year-old Austrian Jew living in Vienna, ‘the whole Viennese population, that is obviously the non-Jewish population, in jubilation and enjoyment. And then the first problem starts, the Jewish shops were smashed.’ In the immediate aftermath of the German invasion, ‘you already had people molesting you … You were completely outlawed. There was no protection from anywhere. Anybody could come up to you and do what they want and that’s it …’53

  Infamously, Nazi thugs made Jews scrub the streets clean in a display of public humiliation. Walter Kammerling remembers watching a well-dressed woman hold up her little girl so that she could see a Stormtrooper kick an old Jew as he scrubbed. ‘They all laughed,’ he says, ‘and she laughed as well – it was a wonderful entertainment [for them], and that shook me.’54

  William Shirer, an American correspondent, witnessed the abuse in Vienna. ‘All sorts of reports of Nazi sadism and from the Austrians it surprises me,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘Jewish men and women made to clean latrines. Hundreds of them … just picked at random off the streets to clean the toilets of the Nazi boys.’55

  This initial upsurge of anti-Semitic action had been mostly spontaneous – a disorganized series of acts of local persecution similar, but on a larger scale, to those launched by Stormtroopers immediately after Hitler became Chancellor. But soon the Nazi leadership discouraged this impulsive brutality and instead the persecution became institutionalized. Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer SS, entered Austria shortly after the first German troops and established his headquarters at the Hotel Metropol in Vienna. Reinhard Heydrich, his close associate and head of the SD – the Sicherheitsdienst, the counter-intelligence operation of the SS – was also soon in the city. On the night of 13–14 March – just thirty-six hours after the German Army had placed their boots on Austrian soil – the Gestapo began to seize works of art from Jewish homes. The priceless art collection of the Rothschilds, for instance, was distributed between Hitler, Göring and the museum in Linz. Less than a week after the occupation of Austria, the Nazis closed down the offices of Jewish organizations and put their leaders behind bars. By the end of March, Jews had been sacked from jobs in professions like the theatre and academia, and banned from serving in the Austrian Army. Jewish property and businesses were also targeted, as the Nazis seized Jewish apartments and took over department stores and factories. This process of ‘Aryanization’ was shortly to be repeated within Germany.

  The first train left Austria for Dachau concentration camp on 1 April 1938. By the end of the year nearly 8,000 people had been sent there from Austria.56 To begin with most were the Nazis’ political opponents, many of Jewish descent. But in May the Nazis began targeting Jews they called ‘asocial’, ‘criminal’ or simply ‘disagreeable’.57 The terror reached such an extreme that a Jewish Austrian was at risk of arrest for simply eating in a restaurant or sitting in a public park at the same time as the authorities launched a search for Jews. Overall, during 1938, more than 75 per cent of the prisoners sent to Dachau by the Nazis were Jewish. On the trains to Dachau, the Austrians were often beaten and otherwise abused. One estimate – made by the SS themselves – was that about 70 per cent of those on one transport they investigated had been attacked.58

  Some Austrian Jews tried to reason with their tormentors. Dr David Schapira, a Viennese Jew who was both a lawyer and a shop owner, was blind as a result of injuries he had suffered during the war. After his legal practice had collapsed and his shop had been taken away from him, he went with his wife to visit Nazi officials in Vienna and hand in a petition, hoping that if they saw his war decorations they would show him mercy. But he was told, ‘Jewish scoundrel, you can shove that Habsburg stuff [his medals] up your ass. Shove off, and don’t come back, or I’ll throw you down the stairs – maybe then you’ll be able to see again.’59

  Suicides were rife among the Jews of Vienna, as many chose death rather than life under Nazi rule. William Shirer wrote how a friend of his
saw ‘a Jewish-looking fellow’ standing at a bar. ‘After a while he took an old-fashioned razor from his pocket and slashed his throat.’60 Goebbels noted cynically in his diary on 23 March 1938: ‘In the past, the Germans committed suicide. Now it is the other way round.’61

  Adolf Eichmann, a thirty-two-year-old lieutenant in the SD, played an important role in the horror in Austria. He was familiar with the country and had gone to school in Linz – just as Hitler had. Afterwards, for six years he had worked in Austria for the Vacuum Oil Company. He joined both the Nazi party and SS in 1932 and the following year, having lost his job, returned to Germany, his country of birth.

  Eichmann, by now specializing in ‘Jewish affairs’ in the SD, had been preparing for the Anschluss for some time, gathering intelligence on those Austrians the Nazis considered a threat. He recalled that ‘for weeks in advance every able-bodied man they could find was put to work in three shifts: writing file cards for an enormous circular card file, several yards in diameter, which a man sitting on a piano stool could operate and find any card he wanted thanks to a series of punch holes.’62 Eichmann thus arrived in Vienna in March 1938 with a list of people, including prominent Jewish figures, to be arrested. But the Nazi authorities discovered that locking up the leaders of the Jewish community led to problems. Since the Nazis were trying to force Jews to emigrate – having robbed them of their wealth – there was nobody, on the Jewish side, left in a leadership position to coordinate the expulsions. So Eichmann gained permission from his superiors to release some leading Jews so that they could help organize the exodus. In one case, Eichmann met Josef Löwenherz, a Jewish lawyer, for a discussion about how Jewish organizations could help the Nazis, and then sent Löwenherz back to his cell to work on the plans.63

  Soon a radical solution emerged – a system Eichmann termed a ‘conveyor belt’.64 Jews seeking emigration would be summoned to one building and then passed between Nazi officials until their expulsion was finalized. In August 1938 this Central Office for Jewish Emigration started work, based in the Rothschild Palace. Altogether 80,000 Austrian Jews left the country between March 1938 and the end of the year.65 By the time the war started in September 1939 the total had risen to nearly 130,000. The Jews were forced to pay for their own departure, with wealthy Jews funding poorer ones through Jewish organizations.

  The invasion of Austria and the subsequent union of the country with Germany was an undoubted success for Hitler’s regime. In particular, the way in which the Jews in Austria had been so quickly targeted, persecuted and expelled, demonstrated a way forward for the Nazis. As a consequence, the Jews within Germany were at greater risk than ever before.

  7. Radicalization

  (1938–1939)

  Hitler’s self-confidence rose to a new level in the wake of the Nazi conquest of Austria. In his speeches in the aftermath of the Anschluss he said that he personally had ‘rendered the greatest service to the German Volk’ and that ‘the period of my leadership of Germany is a historic one of German greatness.’1

  Hitler even claimed that his existence was part of a supernatural plan, boasting that ‘Whoever believes in God must admit: when the fate of a people is altered within three days, then this is divine judgement …’2 and that since God had now decreed that Germany and Austria should be united then, ‘What the Lord has joined together, let no man divide.’3

  But for all this talk of ‘God’ there is no evidence that Hitler was a practising Christian – as we have already seen in the context of Mein Kampf.4 Indeed, he thought Christianity ‘an invention of sick brains’.5 The purpose of life, as he saw it, was for human beings to live and die for the ‘preservation of the species’.6 His personal task was to lead the German Volk towards a new world of prosperity and racial purity. In this endeavour he was helped by a mystical force he called ‘providence’. Memorably, in a speech he gave in 1936 he said that ‘neither threats nor warnings will divert me. I walk the way providence has assigned to me, with the instinctive sureness of a sleepwalker.’7

  However, by spring 1938, Hitler felt that time was running out for him to fulfil the destiny that ‘providence’ had allotted to him. In a speech he gave in Vienna on 9 April, shortly before his forty-ninth birthday, he railed against the fact that he had ‘used up’8 his ‘best years’ in the struggle to gain power. All of this – his fear that time was running out for him to achieve the greatness he sought, his overconfidence in his own genius as a result of the success in Austria and his anxiety that other countries were now investing massively in their armed forces – created a combustible mix.

  The Nazis now began to pursue more radical policies within Germany itself. In an operation that began on 21 April 1938 the Gestapo moved against ‘work-shy’ Germans. Those unemployed who had declined two separate offers of work were taken to Buchenwald concentration camp. The Criminal Police instigated a similar move against ‘asocials’ in June 1938. A significant feature of this operation was that any German Jew who had a previous criminal conviction was arrested as well.9 It didn’t matter if the Jews arrested were fit for work or not, it was enough simply to be a Jew with a criminal conviction and to have previously served one month or more in jail.10 This was one of the first examples of how, in the enforcement of nationwide actions, Jews were treated more harshly than others.

  As a result of these raids, more than 2,000 Jews were imprisoned in conditions that were appalling even by Nazi standards. In Buchenwald many slept in the open. For some of the SS guards the arrival of the Jews offered an opportunity for them to vent both their anger and their sadism. Once admitted to the camp, the Jews were given the hardest jobs and more than ninety died during the summer. Release for these Jews was often possible only if they could convince the SS that they would emigrate immediately.

  Life was also getting worse for the rest of the German Jews. A whole host of anti-Semitic regulations during 1938 further restricted their freedom. Jewish doctors could no longer treat ‘Aryan’ patients, and Jews were banned from a whole raft of jobs, including that of travelling salesman. Concerted efforts were also made by the Nazis to identify and isolate Jews by insisting in a decree of 17 August 1938 that, if they did not already have a first name that was ‘specified’ as Jewish, they had to take the additional name of ‘Israel’ for men or ‘Sara’ for women.11

  At the same time as the implementation of these official measures of persecution the Nazis turned on Jews in the streets, particularly in Berlin where Goebbels was keen to ratchet up the level of anti-Semitic action. Goebbels noted in his diary in June 1938: ‘Spoke in front of three hundred police officers in Berlin. Really got them going. Against all sentimentality. Legality is not the motto, but harassment. The Jews must get out of Berlin. The police will help.’12 As a consequence, Jews were targeted on the streets of Berlin in ways that had not been seen since the early days of Nazi rule.

  A few weeks before his June speech, Goebbels had asked Count Helldorff, the chief of the Berlin police, to put together proposals for harsher anti-Semitic regulations. On 11 June, the day after he gave his speech, he received Helldorf’s memorandum. Though not immediately implemented, it contained many of the ideas for increased persecution that the Nazis would later adopt during the war – such as forcing the Jews to live in separate areas of the city and labelling them with a special mark on their clothing.

  In parallel with these actions against the Jews, ‘asocials’ and the ‘work-shy’, the Nazis also increasingly targeted other distinct groups. The first were the Zigeuner – or ‘Gypsies’. Today these are pejorative words (arguably the German Zigeuner more so than the English ‘Gypsy’). But at the time the predominantly dark-skinned people who had – many hundreds of years before – travelled to Europe from India and now lived an itinerant lifestyle were commonly known as Gypsies. All the legislation drawn up to persecute them, and all those in the camps in which they were later tormented, referred to them by this name. However, the generally accepted term across many countries for those who use
d to be called Gypsies is now ‘Sinti and Roma’, because the majority came originally from groups known by those names.13

  As with the Jews, the history of the persecution of the Sinti and Roma predates the arrival of the Nazis by many years. At the end of the sixteenth century the Sinti and Roma were accused of aiding and abetting the Turks in order to destabilize the Holy Roman Empire, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many German states passed legislation that attacked them. Some laws, like the edict from the ruler of Hesse-Darmstadt in 1734, denied Sinti and Roma the right to enter specific territory and others, like an order passed in Mainz in 1714, even called for Sinti and Roma to be executed.14 Sinti and Roma were denigrated because of their lifestyle – they were accused of living ‘like dogs’15 – and their physical appearance, categorized as ‘black, dirty [and] barbarous’.16

  Just like the Jews, the Sinti and Roma were perceived as shiftless ‘wanderers’ with no permanent home. But it was never clear to what extent they were condemned for qualities that they could not change, like their ancestry, or social attributes that they could alter, like the decision of many Sinti and Roma to travel the countryside rather than settle in one place. Cesare Lombroso, the Italian writer, was one of those who believed that the perceived negative qualities of Sinti and Roma were inherent. In 1902 he wrote that they had a tendency to criminal behaviour because they were born ‘villains’.17 Nonetheless, most of the anti-Gypsy legislation that individual German states passed in the early twentieth century was designed to moderate behaviour rather than to mount a full racial attack. In July 1926 the Bavarian parliament passed a Law for the Combating of Gypsies, Travellers and the Work-Shy,18 which stated, among other restrictions, that no one could travel from place to place with a caravan without permission from the police.